Management Thoughts for Entrepreneurs

Various books and articles about management focus on each aspect of management and discuss skills to master these areas.

Here is my take – Effective management is all about making it easier for employees to perform their jobs to achieve the established goals.

It is the manager’s job to make his/her employees successful. An effective manager works on eliminating obstacles that impede their employees from reaching their goals, and providing the required resources and tools.

Poor managers bent on too much control, in fact, create obstacles for their employees. They create processes that make the jobs of their employees more complicated and difficult.

Do you believe that to effectively communicate your message you need to use more words? Is using too few sentences reducing the importance of your communications? Is being verbose mean you are saying something important? If you think so, you might be wrong!

Effective communication means driving home your point powerfully in as less words as possible.

People have a very short attention span, especially potential investors. If you can’t communicate your message succinctly yet powerfully, you might lose your audience. That is not a good thing for Entrepreneurs.

Regardless of your target audience – investors, clients, employees, vendors, bankers or others – learn to fine tune your message. Make it short and simple, yet effective for them to understand and retain. The longer you speak or write, the less is absorbed.

People will not say that you didn’t speak long enough, but they will definitely tell you that your message was short but effective. What would you rather prefer?

Do you make mistakes? Everyone makes mistakes; Entrepreneurs are no exception.

What separates leaders is that when mistakes are made, genuine leaders offer a sincere apology. How do you do that?

You often hear someone say sorry and then add a “but.” In those cases there are all kinds of excuses after the “but.” All these apologies are watered down by offering excuses. Saying sorry in this case doesn’t mean much.

A sincere apology is just that – sincere! When you make a mistake, no matter affecting which stakeholder, just say a sincere sorry without any excuses or reasons. This will be more genuine than trying to explain what happened to cause that mistake.

To be even more effective, you should privately analyze the reasons for the mistake and establish corrective actions to prevent that in the future. This will appear more sincere to the offended party.